Frank Bruni, columnist for the failing NY Times, challenges his readership with an essay about progressive labeling and their ongoing "Oppression Olympics". Yes, he begins with a privilege check that he admits is nearly disqualifying (white,male, middle-aged, prosoperous suburban childhood). He does not mention the Goolag, but that may have been his intellectual launch point.

Obviously he had this in before the disaster in Charlottesville, which I am happy to not talk about until Monday.

"It is Friday, but Sunday is coming ... This is not the devotional you wish to receive this day. While Good Friday may be the starkest representation of a Friday that we have, life is filled with a lot of Fridays," wrote United Methodist City Society Executive Director the Rev. Bill Shillady in an email to Clinton obtained by CNN [link]. "Friday is the day that it all falls apart and all hope is lost. We all have Fridays. But, as the saying goes, 'Sunday's coming!'"

Have I been disrespecting my religion all these years by being grateful that Friday is here? Awkward moment!

Ahh, but who can listen to this crank anyway? He's comparing the Epic Fail of the Hillarity! 'campaign' to the death of Jesus, for Chrisssake! Furthermore the expression is "Winter is coming", especially if the prospect of Hillary returning to power is the topic of discussion.

The WashEx did not excerpt this bit, which re-emphasizes just how of touch Hillary's pastor is with the nation:

For us, Friday is the phone call from the doctor that the cancer is back. It's the news that you have lost your job. It's the betrayal of a friend, the loss of someone dear. Friday is the day that it all falls apart and all hope is lost. We all have Fridays. But, as the saying goes, "Sunday's coming!"

Friday is the news we have cancer? Those TGI Fridays people are so not woke. However, Sunday's coming, so stop hating, you haters. And stop smiling, dammit! It's still Friday and all we have to look forward to is the Spieth Ascension at the PGA (on Sunday!), as a distraction from apocalyptic fire and fury.

Left unmentioned by Hillary's pastor - Hillary is in for a disappointment if she thinks becoming a minister will position her for the top job in that hierarchy, even though I have no doubt she considers herself to be qualified.

August 10, 2017

KFAR SIRKIN, Israel — Israel is building another wall to protect itself from its enemies. But rather than a major eyesore, much of this one will be invisible.

In the coming months, military officials say, the army will be accelerating construction of a subterranean barrier around the Gaza Strip, designed to cut off tunnels running beneath the border into Israel like the ones Hamasmilitants used to ambush Israeli military posts during the summer-long war of 2014.

Baffling - does Israel keep building walls even though walls can't keep people out? Or do Israeli walls work because, unlike our undocumented friends from South of the border, Palestinians lack imagination and energy? (Maybe Jeb Bush should run for office there).

In any case, its on to the Underground Wall. To be countered, one would expect, by the Underground Railway. Or would that be cultural appropriation?

Writing in the failing NY Times, former Obama Irritant Susan Rice revises her on-the-shelf "Surrender to Iran" speech and advises Trump it is not too late to surrender to North Korea's inexorable will. All we need to do is pipe down and accept (without legitimizing!) North Korea's new status as a nuclear power:

It’s Not Too Late on North Korea

By Susan Rice Aug 10, 2017

North Korea’s substantial nuclear arsenal and improving intercontinental ballistic missile capacity pose a growing threat to America’s security. But we need not face an immediate crisis if we play our hand carefully.

We have long lived with successive Kims’ belligerent and colorful rhetoric — as ambassador to the United Nations in the Obama administration, I came to expect it whenever we passed resolutions. What is unprecedented and especially dangerous this time is the reaction of President Trump. Unscripted, the president said on Tuesday that if North Korea makes new threats to the United States, “they will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” These words risk tipping the Korean Peninsula into war, if the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, believes them and acts precipitously.

Either Mr. Trump is issuing an empty threat of nuclear war, which will further erode American credibility and deterrence, or he actually intends war next time Mr. Kim behaves provocatively. The first scenario is folly, but a United States decision to start a pre-emptive war on the Korean Peninsula, in the absence of an imminent threat, would be lunacy.

However, a war in the Korean peninsula (even if NoKo missiles did not extend the theatre) would be horrible. Therefore:

But war is not necessary to achieve prevention, despite what some in the Trump administration seem to have concluded. History shows that we can, if we must, tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea — the same way we tolerated the far greater threat of thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons during the Cold War.

It will require being pragmatic.

No prizes for guessing what "pragmatic" means.

First, though we can never legitimize North Korea as a nuclear power, we know it is highly unlikely to relinquish its sizable arsenal because Mr. Kim deems the weapons essential to his regime’s survival. The North can now reportedly reach United States territory with its ICBMs. The challenge is to ensure that it would never try.

So we accept, contain and deter Kim, who is not (we assess) suicidal. Currently.

Her suggestions include something I agree with:

Finally, we must begin a dialogue with China about additional efforts and contingencies on the peninsula, and revive diplomacy to test potential negotiated agreements that could verifiably limit or eliminate North Korea’s arsenal.

One might hope or imagine that Trump's rhetoric is aimed at rattling Chinese leadership. They have spent decades thinking the North Korean dynasty is a tolerable nuisance and far preferable to a unified, democratic Korea on their border. Maybe Trump as Madman can convince them to push harder for a middle ground, such as regime change that leaves calmer generals in charge without overthrowing the NoKo government? Possible? Naah - that would sound like a plan and we can't credit Trump's team with anything like that.

I also find myself in agreement here:

Rational, steady American leadership can avoid a crisis and counter a growing North Korean threat. It’s past time that the United States started exercising its power responsibly.

The Nation, hardly a bastion of right-wing conspiracists, picks up the story that the alleged Russian hack of the DNC was in fact an inside job. This notion has percolated on the right for a while but now the Democracy Dies In Darkness crowd will need a bigger pillow. Between this and the Awan-Wasserman non-story they have a lot to not cover.

More recently the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity prepared a report that is a basis for The Nation's story. If the VIPS ring a bell (or try the VIPers) it may be because they emerged during the Bush years in opposition to the Iraq war. They may have been kooks but they were hardly right-wing kooks.

This seems to be the most easily provable or disprovable -- and most dispositive on the subject -- claim being made:

There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year—not by the Russians, not by anyone else. Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak—a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. This casts serious doubt on the initial “hack,” as alleged, that led to the very consequential publication of a large store of documents on WikiLeaks last summer.

The VIPS group also made this claim on July 24th -- that the speed of the download was not possible over the internet, but could only be accomplished through the computer downloading to a physically-attached external storage device.

...

I don't know if that's true -- but it seems easily checkable, and we deserve answers about that.

Given The Nation's long, long history of flacking on behalf of Mother Russia, I am suspicious of their interest in disproving a Russia Hack narrative.

...

I'd like this either rebutted or admitted by the "intelligence" community.

Having been burned so badly on the Iraq intelligence claims in 2003, you would think major U.S. media would apply more journalistic skepticism and rigor here, even if, to the broader public, Russia is a faraway power to which it's easy to ascribe pretty much any nefarious activity. Instead, these outlets seem more intent on noting Putin's bare-chested physique and accusing him of further meddling on social networks.

Bravo! I can resist anything except temptation so she is a stronger person than me.

At the risk of making a point, the virtue signaling is surely related to the old Michael Kinsley quip that "Conservatives are always looking for converts, whereas liberals are always looking for heretics". Earnest liberals are routinely burned at the Twitter-stake for any deviation from progressive orthodoxy, so their signaling is inevitably frequent and frantic.

An article on Tuesday about a sweeping federal climate change report referred incorrectly to the availability of the report. While it was not widely publicized, the report was uploaded by the nonprofit Internet Archive in January; it was not first made public by The New York Times.

That correction, which sits at the foot of the story, dutifully straightens out the record. Yet given the magnitude of the screw-up, it should sit atop the story, surrounded by red flashing lights and perhaps an audio track to instruct readers: Warning: This story once peddled a faulty and damaging premise.

That premise suggests that the Trump administration is stifling a damaging draft report — part of the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment — with dire warnings about climate change.

Yeah, well, they might have been suppressing it - isn't "hide it in plain sight" one of the older tricks in the book? Just Keep On Resisting, you failing Grey Lady, and do the fact checks later, or never.

Many headlines labeled the document “anti-diversity,” misleading readers about its actual contents.

Staying with that theme for a moment, here is Daisuke Wakabayashi, a diversity hire at the failing NY Times, describing the memo (my emphasis):

His 10-page memo, titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” argued that “personality differences” between men and women — like a woman having a lower tolerance for stress — help explain why there were fewer women in engineering and leadership roles at the company. He said efforts by the company to reach equal representation of women in technology and leadership were “unfair, divisive, and bad for business.”

Do tell. That is a lot of misinformation packed into one paragraph. The quoted passage appears here in the original memo:

Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

Here in reality, as detailed by Friedersdorf, Damore lauded some Google efforts to achieve diversity and denounced others. Damore said "discrimination" was divisive; the Times has a different view on workplace discrimination?

Secondly, "personality differences" was just one of several factors cited by Damore; he also mentions IQ differences (Larry Summers territory!). On that topic, here is some interesting stuff from Psychology Today:

And related, from The Economist, on the higher variance of measured male math ability:

Cleverer still

Geniuses are getting brighter. And at genius levels of IQ, girls are not as far behind boys as they used to be

Girls aren't as far behind as they used to be but...:

In the early 1980s, the ratio of males to females in the top 0.01% of maths scores in SAT, the Scholastic Aptitude Test, was around 13 to 1. By the early 1990s it had fallen to four to one. After this, however, it remained obstinately unaltered (see chart). The other two tests, both of which post-date the period in which the SAT shows those huge changes, indicate less lopsided sex ratios of between two and three to one. But neither shows girls making much recent progress towards equality.

The top 0.01% is the incredibly rareified 99.99 percentile. Down at the mere 99th percentile, my math suggests the ratio of boys to girls ought to be about 1.8 to 1. (Confirmation bias alert! Since the high-performing SAT ratios cited in Psychology Today give a ratio close to 1.8 to 1, I stopped there.)

All of which means that the 50/50 male/female benchmark cited by Damore may not be realistic so don't be a science-denier. OTOH, as to whether 50/50 is an actual Google benchmark or a strawman invented by Damore, I don't know.

First, the Silicon Valley kabuki (and yes, we deplore this cultural appropriation. Or is this the day to celebrate diversity? Baffling...)

At the same time, there was a sense in which Damore had to be fired, precisely because of the intertwined realities that he described. Silicon Valley is a very male environment, a land of nerd kings and brogrammers whose deepest beliefs tend to be the sort that men come up with when they don’t have very many women around — arch-libertarian, irreligious, utopian in a mechanistic style.

But the internet industry is also part of a wider elite culture that is trending in the opposite direction, becoming more feminized and feminist, and inclined to view male-dominated enclaves with great suspicion. So Silicon Valley’s leaders use corporate wokeness, diversity initiatives and progressive virtue signaling as a kind of self-protection, a way of promising that they’re mostly men but they’re the good kind of men, so that discrimination lawsuits and antitrust actions and other forms of regulation are less attractive to their critics.

I strongly suspect that more than a few Silicon Valley higher-ups agreed with the broad themes of Damore’s memo. But just as tech titans accept some censorship and oppression as the price of doing business in China, they accept performative progressivism as the price of having nice campuses in the most liberal state in the union and recruiting their employees from its most elite and liberal schools. And for questioning that political performance while defending the disproportionate maleness that makes it necessary, the Google memo-writer simply had to go.

Secondly, an idea of the reality of the Silicon Valley view:

But since the usual way to reintegrate the sexes is to have them marry one another and raise kids, what Silicon Valley probably needs right now more than either workplace anti-microaggression training or an alt-right underground is a basic friendliness to family, pregnancy and child rearing.

This is why the new Apple headquarters, which has a 100,000-square-foot fitness and wellness center but no child care center, is a more telling indicator of what really matters to Silicon Valley than all the professions of gender-egalitarianism that have followed James Damore’s heretical comments about sex differences.

Which leads to his Big Finish:

Those differences, the real ones, have one common root: Women bear children; men do not. Figuring out how to respect that essential fact and all its implications, while also respecting the equality of the sexes, is one of the great challenges of our age. And it’s because we are failing at it that the sexes have begun to go their separate ways.

Friedman begins with some base-bonding, telling us how deplorable Trump is. Yeah, yeah. Eventually, he gets to the "but" (and we all know what Jon Snow says about that):

Whatever happens, Democrats need to win the argument with at least some Trump/G.O.P. voters. There are many ways for Democrats to counter any new and improved Trump. I’d start by acknowledging a simple fact: Some things are true even if Donald Trump believes them!

...

Trump connects with these gut issues and takes them in a destructive direction. It’s vital for Democrats to connect with them and take them in a constructive direction.

What issues? Here’s my list:

• We can’t take in every immigrant who wants to come here; we need, metaphorically speaking, a high wall that assures Americans we can control our border with a big gate that lets as many people in legally as we can effectively absorb as citizens.

Ha ha ha! Stop hating, hater! Read the Statue of Liberty! American is all about building bridges, not walls! And the Democratic Party today is not going to get behind restrictions on immigration or enforcement of immigration law.

The Muslim world does have a problem with pluralism — gender pluralism, religious pluralism and intellectual pluralism — and suggesting that terrorism has nothing to do with that fact is naïve; countering violent extremism means constructively engaging with Muslim leaders on this issue.

Why, after I say "Stop hating, hater" does Friedman keep hating?

Friedman's next point might support from the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party, or not:

Americans want a president focused on growing the economic pie, not just redistributing it. We do have a trade problem with China, which has reformed and closed instead of reformed and opened. We have an even bigger problem with automation wiping out middle-skilled work and we need to generate more blue-collar jobs to anchor communities.

Focusing on jobs rather than class warfare? That's a big ask when the elsewhere the failing NY Times is peddling charts urging a return to the post-WWII economic environment. Hmm, maybe North Korea can nuke Japan and China to recreate the general devastation of the industrial world that allowed the US such prosperity in the 50's and 60's. That's thinking outside the box! (Albeit inside the coffin.)

And the final "Let's be like Trump" point is a thumb in the eye to a bastion of progressive support:

Political correctness on college campuses has run ridiculously riot. Americans want leaders to be comfortable expressing patriotism and love of country when globalization is erasing national identities. America is not perfect, but it is, more often than not, a force for good in the world.

Uhh, this is the racist, misogynistic partriarchy stolen from the Native Americans and built on the backs of slaves that we are talking about here. Pride? In a country that is actually having a back-and-forth about transgender bathrooms? Where a major-party candidate wrote off a quarter of the population as deplorable and "irredeemable"? LOL again.

This is Tom Friedman so let me close by picking my favorite Metaphor Madness from today's column:

"[W]e need, metaphorically speaking, a high wall that assures Americans we can control our border with a big gate that lets as many people in legally as we can effectively absorb as citizens".

A high wall and a big gate to make sure no one is kept out - no one does it better.

The internet giant Google has fired the male engineer at the center of an uproar in Silicon Valley over the past week after he authored an internal memo asserting there are biological causes behind gender inequality in the tech industry.

Since everything old is new again let's flash back to 2005 when Larry Summers, then President of Harvard, touched this third rail with remarks on women in science:

He offered three possible explanations, in declining order of importance, for the small number of women in high-level positions in science and engineering. The first was the reluctance or inability of women who have children to work 80-hour weeks.

The second point was that fewer girls than boys have top scores on science and math tests in late high school years. “I said no one really understands why this is, and itʹs an area of ferment in social science,” Summers said in an interview Saturday. “Research in behavioral genetics is showing that things people previously attributed to socialization werenʹt” due to socialization after all.

As an aside, women drawing on their verbal skills or guys with their flair for math may have noticed that although promised three points we only see two. Many paragraphs later the writer reaches third base - outright discrimination, which economists argue create a market opportunity for the open-minded.

As to science and math test scores, here is a follow-up Economist article from 2012. I am missing a great link to the XX / XY hypothesis, which argues that men have more genetic quirkiness due to their XY nature [Wikipedia on the controversial theory; Psychology Today with brain scans]. As a consequence men are over-represented at both ends of every bell curve - more geniuses, more developmentally disabled, more incredible musicians, more tone-deaf troglodytes, more writers with an incredible flair for illustrative examples, more drones who compare bricks to other bricks, more guys with an incredible sense of smell, more guys with no nose at all (including yours truly; storytime later, but I was once sprayed by a skunk and didn't know it)... OK, we all get it.

That said, let's accept that maybe a target of 50% women in a 'genius' department defies the natural ratio found in society at large. That doesn't mean that there aren't also real sources of discrimination. Nor does it follow that a person making that point is saying that women can't do that job; their point would be that the number of women qualified to do that job might be fewer than the number of similarly qualified men.

My very short take is that this is Larry Summers all over again and that the Fired Guy has some valid points expressed in a politically unacceptable manner. Naturally, this means he is easily caricatured and dismissed. Righties who have spent time debating, ohh, many things (Immigration reform? "Muslim" ban? Transgender bathrooms?) and been told to 'stop hating you hater' know how this works. [The Washington Free Beacon covers CNN's version of this approach.]

I also suspect that Google's diversity program, in the manner of most human endeavor, has some ludicrous rough edges and unfortunate results.

Damore might have more legal options than you'd guess -- he filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board before publishing his memo, and the NLRB protects people against firing once they've lodged a complaint...

The failing NY Times has more here and here, including a job offer for Fired Guy from alleged rapist Julian Assange. Those haters gotta stick together! (Sorry, trying to get ahead of the CNN/Maddow curve. Do not attempt this at home...)

Conservatives say environmentalists are hypocrites if they consume more energy than the average American. It's a deceitful, disingenuous argument.

Eventually she defends that notion:

But the hypocrisy charge simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. An anti-abortion advocate who believes abortion is immoral and should be illegal, but gets one herself, is a hypocrite. But climate change advocates who don’t live a carbon-neutral lifestyle aren’t hypocrites because, for the most part, they’re not asking you to live a carbon-neutral lifestyle. They’re asking governments, utilities, energy companies, and large corporations to increase their use of renewable energy so that you can continue to live your life as you please, without contributing to global warming.

Advocates like Gore certainly have suggested ways individuals can do their part. In 2007, he stated, “The only way to solve this [climate] crisis is for individuals to make changes in their own lives.” But just a year later, he said, “In addition to changing the light bulbs, it is far more important to change the laws and to change the treaty obligations that nations have.” Last month, he said the three best ways are to talk about climate change (which he does), look for environmentally responsible choices when making large purchases (which he does), and support climate-friendly political candidates (which he does). Individual action has never been the focus of his message.

Hmm. Are we really "asking" utilities etc. to favor renewable energy when we put out laws, regulations and taxes pushing them in that direction? And this whole "don't change your lightbulbs - change the law so that your neighbors have to change their lightbulbs!" line of reasoning seems, dare I say it, disingenuous.

In any case, "live your life as you please" in a world of higher energy prices certainly means people will be making sacrifices - more money for the energy bill means less money for other things. But wait!

As David Roberts pointed out in Vox last year, the reason climate advocates don’t intensely advocate for personal behavioral changes is that they’re “insignificant to the big picture on climate.” That’s true even for huge energy users. DiCaprio’s emissions “are a fart in the wind when it comes to climate change,” Roberts wrote. “If he vanished tomorrow, and all his emissions with him, the effect on global temperature, even on US emissions, even on film-industry emissions, would be lost in the noise.” And it wouldn’t be hypocrisy, since DiCaprio isn’t asking you to stop flying.

Has the political climate changed in Washington? A new report on climate change is circulating for government approval. It has the sort of message Obama or Hillary would love, but Trump and EPA chief Scott Pruitt might engage in heated debate. Time will tell.

Government Report Finds Drastic Impact of Climate Change on U.S.

By Lisa Friedman Aug 7, 2017

Since you ask, no - the word "drastic" does not appear in the report.

WASHINGTON — The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years, according to a sweeping federal climate change report awaiting approval by the Trump administration.

The draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies, which has not yet been made public, concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now. It directly contradicts claims by President Trump and members of his cabinet who say that the human contribution to climate change is uncertain, and that the ability to predict the effects is limited.

“Evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans,” a draft of the report states. A copy of it was obtained by The New York Times.

The authors note that thousands of studies, conducted by tens of thousands of scientists, have documented climate changes on land and in the air. “Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse (heat-trapping) gases, are primarily responsible for recent observed climate change,” they wrote.

And the politics?

The report was completed this year and is a special science section of the National Climate Assessment, which is congressionally mandated every four years. The National Academy of Sciences has signed off on the draft report, and the authors are awaiting permission from the Trump administration to release it.

...

The E.P.A. is one of 13 agencies that must approve the report by Aug. 18. The agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt, has said he does not believe that carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to global warming.

“It’s a fraught situation,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geoscience and international affairs at Princeton University who was not involved in the study. “This is the first case in which an analysis of climate change of this scope has come up in the Trump administration, and scientists will be watching very carefully to see how they handle it.”

Scientists say they fear that the Trump administration could change or suppress the report. But those who challenge scientific data on human-caused climate change say they are equally worried that the draft report, as well as the larger National Climate Assessment, will be publicly released.

“There has always been a section of the left, which I call the whiny party — the party that doesn’t really wanna win, they just wanna be pure, and if they go down swinging purely, then that’s fine," Dean, who ran for president in 2004, told MSNBC's Joy Reid on "AM Joy."

"Well, the problem with that is it leaves behind the people who really need their help," he continued. "If we’re gonna have a single-payer or Medicare for all or whatever, we’re gonna have healthcare that covers every American, as every other industrialized country has, then we all have to pull together."

Hmm, interesting to hear the right doesn't have a monopoly on "purity over victory". And here I thought that on the left the only principle was power.

August 06, 2017

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg for President? You might think he doesn't have a prayer, but in fact he is no longer an atheist.

Bill Scher of Politico offers some free advice to Zuckerberg. This is my favorite bit, urging Zuckerberg to get back to comprehensive immigration "reform":

Trump grabbed onto the immigration issue and never let go. You started FWD.us, in a failed attempt to pass immigration reform under Obama, and seemingly gave up. The group still exists, but you remain behind the scenes.

Now immigration is back on the front page, as Trump is proposing a 50 percent cut in the number of legal immigrants America will accept, with an emphasis on skilled, English-speaking workers. FWD.us is opposing the legislation. But your personal Facebook page is silent, when you could be playing a much bigger public role. Since a priority of imported skilled workers is good for Silicon Valley corporations, you would have extra credibility in going against your self-interest, and arguing that a strict emphasis on high-skill labor is economically myopic and antithetical to the American spirit.

Lest you wonder, this passage makes it clear that Bill Scher has not done his homework and has no idea who he is advising:

4. Take down an opponent. Politics is bloodsport. It won’t come easily for you, as you are more accustomed to geeky Facebook live chats. But political neophytes need to show voters they can throw a punch.

NFL great LaDainian Tomlinson scores again with his Hall of Fame induction speech:

With Open Arms, LaDainian Tomlinson Leads Hall of Fame Inductees

From the AP Aug 6, 2017

CANTON, Ohio — As he so often did on the field, LaDainian Tomlinson stole the show.

With a powerful speech calling for “Team America” to be a place for inclusion and opportunity, Tomlinson, the great running back for the San Diego Chargers, was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday night.

He was joined by running back Terrell Davis, quarterback Kurt Warner, defensive end Jason Taylor, safety Kenny Easley, kicker Morten Andersen, and the Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. Tomlinson and Taylor were elected in their first year of eligibility.

All spoke eloquently, with bursts of humor and heartwarming stories. But Tomlinson’s words resonated so strongly that he drew several standing ovations not only from the crowd of 13,400, but from his fellow Hall of Famers.

“Football is a microcosm of America,” Tomlinson said. “All races, religions and creeds, living, playing, competing side by side. When you’re part of a team, you understand your teammates — their strengths and weaknesses — and work together toward the same goal, to win a championship.

“Let’s not choose to be against one another. Let’s choose to be for one another.”

Tomlinson added: “I pray we dedicate ourselves to being the best team we can be, working and living together, representing the highest ideals of mankind. Leading the way for all nations to follow.”

I MUST ADD: "Daddy" has been working the night shift and explains the Wasserman Schultz hushed-up scandal.

August 05, 2017

If DoJ media source threat is real (I assume it's not; just a show presser to please WH) then I look forward to ignoring that subpoena

OK, so sort of like Sunday morning when I look forward to ignoring Chuck Todd.

But please spare us the cheap talk - the late Tim Russert, who made Meet The Press what it is, chatted like a teen-age girl with both the FBI investigators and Fitzgerald's grand jury during the Valerie Plame "investigation".

A lot of this was negotiated so that Russert was able to pretend to be a journalistic stalwart in public, bashing fellow reporters like Robert Novak for their cooperation with Fitzgerald. And had the Plame leak investigation gone away, he might have been able to keep his little secret. Bygones.

Meanwhile, Chuck Todd is thrilling his base with his bold talk. The cheap suitcase moment, if it comes, will be behind closed doors with plenty of lawyers present.

The tripling of open investigations since January, Mr. Sessions indicated, was driven by a surge in complaints by security agencies about unauthorized disclosures of classified information. He said that during the first six months of the Trump administration, the Justice Department received nearly as many criminal referrals as it did during the three previous years combined.

Two problems complicated assessments of those ratios. First, the department declined to disclose specific figures for the number of such referrals and open investigations. Moreover, its method of tracking such numbers conflates leaks to the news media with other types of unauthorized disclosures, like spying for a foreign power. It was not clear whether the ratios would shift if only leaks to journalists were considered.

The department’s conflation of different types of unauthorized disclosure investigations led to confusion when Mr. Sessions said the Justice Department has already handled four such cases this year, because there has been only one known new leak case in the Trump era so far: the charging in June of Reality Leigh Winner, a contractor working for the N.S.A., with sending an intelligence report about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election to The Intercept.

Mr. Rosenstein later clarified that only one of those four unauthorized disclosure cases specifically involved a leak to the news media.

I guess reporters understood there would be no math.

MORE: The NY Times' James Risen spent time in court battling the Obama Administration so he writes with fervor about aggressive investigative tactics and how Trump might walk the road paved by Obama.

August 04, 2017

But in addition to his US flag issues, Kaepernick brings additional baggage to Miami:

Kaepernick could be a good fit for the Dolphins, whose coaching staff has already shown the flexibility required to build around a quarterback with a non-conventional skill set. However, the support Kaepernick has shown for former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro could be a deal breaker in Miami, where a large population of Cuban exiles remains fervently anti-Castro.

For heaven's sake. I bet if Kaepernick went to a tryout with the Detroit Lions he'd show up in a Tesla.

The move, which requires the agreement of every senator, means the Senate will be in session every three business days throughout the August recess.

...

Trump isn't the first president to face the procedural roadblock from Congress.

The Senate has used the brief sessions to block recess appointments for decades, including last year to keep President Barack Obama from being able to fill a vacant Supreme Court seat.

But the current deal comes after Trump repeatedly lashed out at Attorney General Jeff Sessions, sparking speculation that he would fire the former senator and try to name his successor while Congress was out of town.

August 03, 2017

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has impaneled a grand jury in Washington to investigate Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections, a sign that his inquiry is growing in intensity and entering a new phase, according to people familiar with the matter.

The existence of the D.C. grand jury is a sure sign that Mueller pressing hard. As one expert told the Journal:

This doesn’t mean [Mueller] is going to bring charges, but it shows he is very serious. He wouldn’t do this if it were winding down.

It didn’t require the impaneling of the new grand jury to tell us this, though. We already knew it from the way Mueller has staffed this case — excessively and with plenty of Hillary-supporting Democrats.

Indeed, the Journal also reports that Mueller recently added Greg Andres, a top partner in a big New York law firm, to his team. Andres is a former top Justice Department official who also oversaw the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn. No one believes he would leave his law firm to participate in a low-level, short-lived investigation.

They'll find something to satisfy The Resistance. Whether it convinces the rest of us remains a real puzzle.

Leaking the transcript of a presidential call to a foreign leader is unprecedented, shocking, and dangerous. It is vitally important that a president be able to speak confidentially—and perhaps even more important that foreign leaders understand that they can reply in confidence.

Thursday’s leak to The Washington Post of President Trump’s calls with the president of Mexico and the prime minister of Australia will reverberate around the world. No leader will again speak candidly on the phone to Washington, D.C.—at least for the duration of this presidency, and perhaps for longer. If these calls can be leaked, any call can be leaked—and no leader dare say anything to the president of the United States that he or she would not wish to read in the news at home.

No kidding. But The Resistance has to resist (and persist!) so here we are. Until we elect a Democratic President, obviously.

But that pesky stock market keeps going up! So the Times explains why, doing their Very Bestest to keep Trump out of it. Spoiler Alert: They nearly succeed.

Wall Street, Climbing Sharply, Skips Washington’s ‘Soap Opera’

By Nelson D. Schwartz Aug 2, 2017

Despite the disorder in Washington — with a revolving door at the White House and roadblocks on Capitol Hill — Wall Street and corporate America are booming.

The disconnect was evident Wednesday, as the Dow Jones industrial average passed the 22,000 mark, a new high. At the same time, blue chips like Apple, Caterpillar and U.S. Steel have all reported strong earnings in recent weeks that surpassed analysts’ forecasts.

“None of the soap opera in Washington matters,” said Frank Sullivan, chief executive of RPM International, a Cleveland-based maker of specialty coatings and sealants like Rust-Oleum. “Nobody in business cares about who talked to who in Russia.”

What does matter, Mr. Sullivan said, is stronger global demand in heavy industries like mining and oil and gas, a weaker dollar that helps exporters, and a lighter regulatory touch by the new administration.

After that it's back to broader economic trends:

The initial stock market rally that followed Mr. Trump’s victory in November — the so-called Trump bump — was fueled by optimism among investors that long-sought action on tax reform and infrastructure spending might finally be at hand.

Few analysts are so sanguine now, especially after Republicans could not agree last month on how to repeal the Affordable Care Act, after years of promising to do so. If anything, simplifying the tax code or investing in new roads and bridges seems farther out of reach than ever.

But a market surge based on political hopes has been replaced by one more firmly grounded in the financial realm.

Besides steady economic growth or less regulation, investors also have been encouraged by the loose reins of central banks like the Federal Reserve, which have helped keep interest rates not far above their historic lows. Inflation, too, remains tame, with price increases in recent months actually falling short of the Fed’s targets.

To which I would add: there is always the possibility of "productive" tax reform, where an enterprise-stifling tax is reduced or repealed. The corporate tax rate might be a broad example. For illustrative purposes, a high tax on the use of the internet would be incredibly stupid, and if something like that were on the books we could boost growth by repealing it. But suppose the Fed doesn't believe the tax cuts on the table will enhance productivity. Then it is arguable that what the Treasury giveth the Fed will taketh away - lower taxes will prompt higher interest rates, leaving us marching in place.

Similarly, "smart" infrastructure - e.g., a better airport, bridge or rail hub that saves us more than it costs after appropriate discounting is applied - can boost growth. "Dumb" infrastructure, or to be less judgmental, "non-smart" infrastructure, might be offset by the Fed.

Regulatory reform could be subject to the same dynamics. For example, the Fed could raise rates to slow the economy if they think the new Administration is "over-heating" the economy by encouraging fracking, or bank lending. But IMHO the Fed would be inclined to wait for the cause and effect to become apparent. With taxes or spending, the amounts and dates are somewhat predictable. Increased confidence by frackers and bank lenders? Harder to measure and attribute, since confidence can be enhanced or diminished for many reasons.

Well. Presidents often get more credit for the economy than they deserve, but I think Trump deserves some credit for being Trump and a lot of credit for not being Hillary.

UPDATE: The failing NY Times discusses the proposed immigration reforms that led to the press conference debacle. Their front page summary includes a point that will strike some as counter-intuitive (Kaus Aneurysm Alert!):

Critics said the bill, which would cut legal immigration in half within a decade, would keep out badly needed low-wage workers.

The US economy badly needs low-wage workers? Yet on alternate days Democrats scream that wages have been stagnant for fifteen years. Dare we ask, which is it?

But let me not belabor only the Democrats; the NY Times story quotes a reliable Chamber of Commerce Republican who apparently did not notice the working class revolt last November:

But Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, noted that agriculture and tourism were his states top two industries. “If this proposal were to become law, it would be devastating to our state’s economy, which relies on this immigrant work force,” he said. “Hotels, restaurants, golf courses and farmers,” he added, “will tell you this proposal to cut legal immigration in half would put their business in peril.”

The failing NY Times has a longish magazine piece that, among other things, belabors a good question - why have so many motivated, intelligent people been unable to succeed with their diet plan du jour? Oprah Winfrey is Exhibit A.

The American Conservative attacks from the flank, noting that despite the lofty rhetoric from health authorities the US Government continues to coddle Big Food.

August 01, 2017

The NY Times runs a shocking opinion piece that could have been written by Rush Limbaugh. Baffling:

When Progressives Embrace Hate

By Bari Weiss AUG. 1, 2017

She launches with the Women's March last winter and then re-examines its leadership:

The leaders of the Women’s March, arguably the most prominent feminists in the country, have some chilling ideas and associations. Far from erecting the big tent so many had hoped for, the movement they lead has embraced decidedly illiberal causes and cultivated a radical tenor that seems determined to alienate all but the most woke.

Yes they have and yes they do, as she explains. But why is the Times running this when they could be bashing Trump?

TROUBLE IN MY BLUE HEAVEN: Mediate notes some intramural scuffling at the Old Grey Burka-Embracing Lady.

Who could blame the people who felt abandoned and ignored by the major parties for reaching in despair for a candidate who offered oversimplified answers to infinitely complex questions and managed to entertain them in the process? With hindsight, it is clear that we all but ensured the rise of Donald Trump.

From his conclusion:

So, where should Republicans go from here? First, we shouldn’t hesitate to speak out if the president “plays to the base” in ways that damage the Republican Party’s ability to grow and speak to a larger audience. Second, Republicans need to take the long view when it comes to issues like free trade: Populist and protectionist policies might play well in the short term, but they handicap the country in the long term. Third, Republicans need to stand up for institutions and prerogatives, like the Senate filibuster, that have served us well for more than two centuries.

OK, "grow and speak to a larger audience" means immigration amnesty, a position rejected by many Republicans. Defending free trade is fine IF the free-traders are willing to do a bit more to compensate and/or retrain workers in losing industries.

And defending institutions and prerogatives is a timeless conservative task, but I am not sure I would raise my banner over the Senate filibuster. That will be swept aside by the Democrats the next chance they get, so defending it now just allows Republicans to experience a principled defeat down the road.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose,” George Orwell wrote, “needs a constant struggle.” An unnoticed reason for cheerfulness is that in one, if only one, particular, Trump is something the nation did not know it needed: a feeble president whose manner can cure the nation’s excessive fixation with the presidency.

Executive power expanded, with only occasional pauses (thank you, Presidents Taft and Coolidge, of blessed memory), throughout the 20th century and has surged in the 21st. After 2001, “The Decider” decided to start a preventive war and to countenance torture prohibited by treaty and statute. His successor had “a pen and a phone,” an indifference to the Constitution’s take care clause (the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed”) and disdain for the separation of powers, for which he was repeatedly rebuked by the Supreme Court.

Fortunately, today’s president is so innocent of information that Congress cannot continue deferring to executive policymaking. And because this president has neither a history of party identification nor an understanding of reciprocal loyalty, congressional Republicans are reacquiring a constitutional — a Madisonian — ethic. It mandates a prickly defense of institutional interests, placing those interests above devotion to parties that allow themselves to be defined episodically by their presidents.

I hadn't thought of it this way...

Fastidious people who worry that the president’s West Virginia and Ohio performances — the alpha male as crybaby — diminished the presidency are missing the point, which is: For now, worse is better. Diminution drains this office of the sacerdotal pomposities that have encrusted it. There will be 42 more months of this president’s increasingly hilarious-beyond-satire apotheosis of himself, leavened by his incessant whining about his tribulations (“What dunce saddled me with this silly attorney general who takes my policy expostulations seriously?”). This protracted learning experience, which the public chose to have and which should not be truncated, might whet the public’s appetite for an adult president confident enough to wince at, and disdain, the adoration of his most comically groveling hirelings.

Hmm. People who thought we couldn't do worse than Bush brought us Clinton. And then another Bush. Followed by Obama. But at some point we hit the bottom and bounce (even if only dead-cat style).

That said, Will does not identify any adults on the Presidential horizon.

July 30, 2017

Ross Douthat is very interesting in discussing why a Republican Party that can't govern retain power in competition with a Democratic Party that can't campaign.

Douthat includes a link to a poignant piece by Peter Beinart, card-carrying progressive, who contrasts the current totally 'woke' Democratic view on immigration with Democratic notions of a decade ago.

This snippet is on one consequence of the takeover of academia by the left:

Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their “desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the wrong conclusion.”

No kidding. That tends to follow from the "Everyone who disagree with me is a bigot" style of argumentation from the left.

In a similar vein, Beinart is just being polite here, or delusional:

Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.

Liberals have to attempt to show some solidarity with the racists and rubes in flyover country? LOL. If that is the answer to the Democrats electoral woes we can look forward to a long period of Republican (non)rule.

July 29, 2017

There’s more than bank fraud going on here. In Washington, it’s never about what they tell you it’s about. So take this to the bank: The case of Imran Awan, Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s mysterious Pakistani IT guy, is not about bank fraud.

Now for laughs, not to mention fairness and balance, let's peruse a failing NY Times piece mumbling about why this is probably No Big Deal:

Trump Fuels Intrigue Surrounding a Former I.T. Worker’s Arrest

So already a warning to their Upper West Side readership - it's Trump, so feel free to discount it heavily. For those readers for whom the caffeine has yet to kick in they open with the same theme:

WASHINGTON — For months, conservative news outlets have built a case against Imran Awan, his wife, two brothers and a friend, piece by piece.

To hear some commentators tell it, with the help of his family and a cushy job on Capitol Hill, Mr. Awan, a Pakistani-American, had managed to steal computer hardware, congressional data and even — just maybe — a trove of internal Democratic National Committee emails that eventually surfaced last summer on WikiLeaks. It helped that the story seems to involve, if only tangentially, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Florida congresswoman who is the former chairwoman of the committee and an ally of Hillary Clinton’s.

The Daily Caller, with almost two dozen articles on the family, has led the pack in reporting the story, packaging new details that have dribbled out of the investigation into a growing web of material, even as few in the mainstream news media paid attention.

Nothing to see here, until the paragraph four plot twist:

That is until Monday, when Mr. Awan was arrested by the F.B.I. and United States Capitol Police on seemingly unrelated charges as he tried to board a flight to Pakistan. In the days since, the story has raced down an increasingly familiar track at warp speed, from the fringes of the internet to Fox News and other established publications.

But for all the publicity, few if any of the fundamental facts of the case have come into focus. The criminal complaint against Mr. Awan filed on Monday alleges that he and his wife conspired to secure a fraudulent loan, not to commit espionage or political high jinks. And Mr. Awan’s lawyer, Christopher Gowen, says the more explosive accusations are the product of an anti-Muslim, right-wing smear job targeting his client and his client’s family.

So is the family’s story the stuff of a spy novel, ripe for sleuthing and criminal prosecution, or simply an overblown Washington story, typical of midsummer? Many here are finding it hard to say.

The irony of "few if any of the fundamental facts of the case have come into focus" and "simply an overblown Washington story" seems to be lost on the "All the Russian Speculation That Is Fit To Print" Times.

On this date in 1996, one of the greatest Olympians of all time completed his most impressive feat.

At the Summer Games in Atlanta, Carl Lewis squeaked into the final round of the long jump on his last attempt. Then on his third jump of the final round, Lewis unleashed a jump of 27 feet, 10¾ inches, which moved him into first place.

Lewis passed on two of his last three jumps, and when Mike Powell fouled on his last leap, Lewis had done it.

He won the long jump for the fourth straight Olympics, becoming the second track and field athlete to win four consecutive Olympic golds in the same event, along with discus thrower Al Oerter from 1956 to 1968.

Only two other athletes in any sport have won four straight golds in one Olympic event: Michael Phelps in the 200-meter individual medley from 2004 to 2016, and Denmark’s Paul Elvstrom in the one-person dinghy from 1948 to 1960.

I would say Carl Lewis has been eclipsed by Usain Bolt, leaving Jesse Owens in the mix for greatest Olympic sprinter. On the men's side - I don't want to get in an argument with or about John McEnroe.